Sloane knows better than to cry in front of anyone. With suicide now an international epidemic, one outburst could land her in The Program, the only proven course of treatment. Sloane’s parents have already lost one child; Sloane knows they’ll do anything to keep her alive. She also knows that everyone who’s been through The Program returns as a blank slate. Because their depression is gone—but so are their memories.
Under constant surveillance at home and at school, Sloane puts on a brave face and keeps her feelings buried as deep as she can. The only person Sloane can be herself with is James. He’s promised to keep them both safe and out of treatment, and Sloane knows their love is strong enough to withstand anything. But despite the promises they made to each other, it’s getting harder to hide the truth. They are both growing weaker. Depression is setting in. And The Program is coming for them.
Rating: 1/5 Stars
Today at
work there was no internet.
This week
I’m working at a medical clinic as a secretary to cover for a vacation. Sadly,
yesterday morning some workmen accidentally cut down the internet cable
(somehow not killing themselves in the process, thank God) and that brought us
two major problems.
1.We can't
authorize the medical orders we receive because they are all done online, which
means we’ll have to do them all at once as soon as internet is up again.
2.It’s
winter holidays for us, which means that pretty much everybody but us is out of
town, so there aren’t many patients to attend. Without work and without
internet, the eight hours are a torture.
Now, why
should you care about this? You shouldn’t, it’s boring as f*ck but it explains
why I read this entire book today. Because I had nothing better to do (ok
that’s not totally true I still had the Chrome dinosaur game, but playing it
for eight hours would be its own kind of torture).
I picked up
The Program because I was curious about suicide being epidemic; Why were there
so many teens committing suicide? What was causing it? Was it only in the US or
the rest of the world?
Spoiler
alert, none of that was clarified or even talked about in this book. Instead
all we got was a shitty representation of mental illness, one dimensional
characters and a useless love triangle that was there only for the sake of
drama (had I cared for it, that’s is).
Now, with
most of my reviews I try to find a positive aspect in every book. I mean, even
though I didn’t like it doesn’t mean that it’s horrible, is it? Well no such
thing happens here. The best thing I can say about it is that the writing is
simple and makes it easy to read. THAT’S IT
I know that
it’s always a hit or miss with books representing mental illness, and now that
I can see the reviews for it I agree that a dystopian setting was not the best
choice to portray this story. But no matter what choice of setting or genre,
the representation of mentally ill people on The Program was still one of the
worst I’ve had the displeasure of reading in a while.
For some
unknown reason, teenagers are committing more and more suicide (again, is it
just in the US or what about the rest of the world?). It’s gotten to the point
where teenage suicide is considered an epidemic. As a result, a new
experimental program has been created to fix this called… the Program (what is
it with dystopias and their names for stuff? Would it kill them to make it more
original??) But the… Program is not perfect, it works by brainwashing teens and
eliminating their memories so they won’t be suicidal anymore (don’t ask me how
that makes sense because it doesn’t).
Sloane has
lost her brother because of the pandemic, and then her best friend because of
the program. Now all she has left is her boyfriend James and best friend Miller
but she’s afraid that the Program will take that too, and afraid that they could
take her as well.
Every time
I read a book about mental illness I try to keep an open mind because I know
that not everybody experiences it the same, so I won’t go around saying “Oh
that’s not how I see it so it can’t be true!”
Sadly
enough, this is not a case of “it’s me not you” this is a case of an author who
tried to use mental illness as a plot device and didn’t even do any kind of
freaking research on it.
When I
first started reading, I knew that there was something wrong. The Program
forbids students from doing sports (because the competition would put too much
stress on them) forbids them from expressing their feelings (you cry and you’re
sent to being brainwashed). Basically the program did EVERYTHING you should NOT
do to help people with depression and/or suicidal tendencies.
But first I
was optimistic and thought “Huh, maybe this program represents people’s misconceptions
about mental illness and how they affect people?” I mean, it made sense. We
know that there are many clichés and beliefs about this, so when people try to
help they can end up doing more bad than good.
The further
I got into the story the more I realized that that was not the case here, and
that in fact the whole book was one huge misconception about depression and
suicide told as “fact”.
Look, I
know that when you write (and particularly fantasy or dystopian) you can take a
few liberties. After all, books would be boring if authors did everything by
the book and didn’t create anything new, right? But you have to draw the line,
and The Program takes a very serious topic such as mental illness and
trivializes it to the point where it almost looks like it’s making fun of it.
I’m pretty sure (at least I hope so) that this was not the author’s intention,
but you can’t argue with the results here.
Nothing is
taken seriously, and nothing is explored in depth. Depression here is… crying?
From time to time apparently? And suicide is something that happens all of the
sudden and for no reason at all. One minute the person is totally fine, the
next they have mood swings, then they start drawing black holes like in The
Ring, and then they kill themselves. There was no explanation for it, these
people were apparently attacked by the disease and decided to die. That was it.
It didn’t
help that the story was narrated by Sloane, and she wasn’t suicidal nor
depressive.
BUT, apparently
she was because she wanted to cry when she remembered her brother who had
killed himself, or when she was afraid of being taken by the Program and being
brainwashed into someone new. I mean, the girl laughed, lived, enjoyed and not
sporadically. She only felt sad from time to time when she remembered the
shitty situation she was in, but because she couldn’t be 100% happy 100% of the
time, she was clearly disturbed.
This
happened all the time. Crying was the same as being suicidal, cutting yourself
was suicidal, drawing black holes was suicidal; basically the book just took
some stuff here and there and just smashed them together and said “These are
suicidal thoughts! This is depression!” without having actually bothered to do
any research on it.
There was
no in-depth behind depression or behind the suicides, they just happened to
further the plot along. It was sick.
The
characters weren’t any better, they had nothing going on. They weren’t
interesting, compelling or anything other than cookie-cutter.
I do not
recommend this book, I’m too pissed at it.
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